When the mafia extorts money from you to allow you to live, they call it "protection money." When the government does it, they call it "consumer protection." Either way, you are paying for protection from someone who has the power to take everything you have.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Yesterday, Barack Obama gave his much anticipated climate change speech at Georgetown University in which he announced his "war on coal" as he empowers the EPA to begin implementing his climate change policies, sans Congressional approval.

After the speech, the White House sent out an email challenging all Americans to get behind the President's agenda, saying, "No single step can reverse the effects of climate change, but that's no excuse for inaction. We have a moral obligation to leave our kids a planet that's not broken and polluted."

The very thought that human beings can determine the weather patterns used to be the subject of bad jokes--"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it. " Now climate is being used an excuse to advance a radical environmental agenda which is simply old-time Marxism repackaged and renamed.

The war on coal is only the beginning, and the speech yesterday just brought into the sunlight a process that has been taking place in the shadows for years. Obama's entire Administration has been about advancing climate change policies through every agency of government. This is not about cleaning up the environment or saving the planet for our kids--it is about advancing the United Nation's radical environmental Agenda 21 and destroying Western Civilization.

In 1992, the United Nation's Earth Summit drafted a policy document called Agenda 21 which calls for "a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced--a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources...This shift will demand a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level."

For the past twenty-one years, all of us have experienced almost daily indoctrination into global environmentalism and "sustainability" as this "profound reorientation of human society" works its way into our daily lives. To really understand what the global environmental movement is doing, we need to accept that all of us who live in wealthy developed nations, and particularly everyone in the U.S., are the enemy as far as the U.N and environmentalists are concerned. The major threat to the world's survival is Western affluence and Western lifestyles. According to environmentalists, we produce too much, and we consume too much because of economic systems which foster prosperity. This prosperity and our levels of consumption and production cause other nations to want to emulate us and to produce and consume at equal levels. But this aspiration for a better life is "unsustainable" and will lead to global disaster, according to climate change proponents. The only solution to this problem is to reduce the living standards of Western nations to the levels of third world countries so that all of the world is in an equal state of misery.

In 2012, the Earth Summit and Agenda 21 had a twentieth anniversary party in Rio de Janeiro where the U.N. reaffirmed its dedication to global environmentalism in a new document called The Future We Want.

The Future We Want is a 21st century message with 21st century messaging. It has its own Twitter hashtag--#futurewewant--and links to live streaming UN web TV with messages from the current Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, covering everything from his zero hunger challenge to the eradication of poverty worldwide to his goals for a more sustainable future. Last year, China asked 230 of its citizens to participate in a video titled, "The Future We Want 2032" which they stated their dreams for the next two decades.

I really encourage all Americans to watch this short film, 2032: The Future We Want, which includes young Chinese people expressing hope for a future in which national boundaries no longer exist and they are able to speak Chinese with people from all over the world. The film takes on special significance when we recognize that China's one-child policies are a model for the global environmental movement and that a primary goal of the "sustainable" movement is to transition China to the world's premier economy.

Here in the U.S., Agenda 21 is being implemented locally, in cities and towns across America that have joined ICLEI. However, it is also being implemented through mandates from the EPA, the USDA, various grant programs which provide funds for "smart growth" and executive orders signed by President Obama. This piecemeal enactment is necessary because we have failed to pass a federal climate change bill which would allow proponents of climate change legislation a huge framework in which to enact all of the elements at once. Agenda 21 calls for each of the 177 countries which signed onto the treaty to enact a federal bill implementing its goals.

Although there are hundreds of U.N. programs linked in some way to climate change and Agenda 21, I have reduced the U.N.'s policies down to five basic stages of implementation. Many of these are happening simultaneously.

Stage One--Control of Housing and Transportation

This stage is being implemented through "Smart Growth" and Smart Code which rezones areas of cities to mandate small, urban mixed-use housing with retail on the bottom of buildings and residents packed into tiny housing over the stores. Although Smart Growth advances on a local level, the Obama Administration is openly using all of the tools at its disposal to get rid of suburbs and "Manhattanize" America. Closely related to this is an increased emphasis on public transportation through grants and funding designed to increase the usage of public transportation while the EPA and the government raise fuel efficiency standards on cars that will price lower-income people out of cars totally. Also closely related is higher energy prices which make driving automobiles unaffordable--for example, refusing to approve the Keystone Pipeline. Obama's "war on coal" will increase the cost of heating and cooling single family homes to the point where they are no longer cost effective. These policies, combined with new restrictions on mortgage credit which take effect in January of 2014, high property taxes produced by urban redevelopment projects, and high housing costs produced by land rationing, will all serve to move people out of individual housing and into tightly packed "sustainable" human settlements. A primary goal of Agenda 21 is the abolition of all private property, and getting people out of houses is key to the accomplishment of that goal.

Stage Two: Global Arms Control and Disarmament

This stage is essential because of potential fallout from the remaining three stages. It is no accident that Obama began his second term by demanding new gun control measures and a national gun registry. On an international front, he is also insisting that we reduce our nuclear arsenal even as other nations like South Korea and Iran are working to develop their own nuclear weapons. Last month the U.N. announced that it was Iran's "turn" to chair the nuclear disarmament conference. In an ironic twist worthy of the world's great literature, the treaty that is supposed to protect the civilized world from "rogue nations" is being overseen by the leader of one of the most dangerous nations on the planet. But Obama is a "citizen of the world" and he understands that the decline of the U.S. is necessary to the accomplishment of the U.N.'s greater goals, so he does not mind crippling the defenses of our nation or our citizens. The weaker we are, the better.

Stage Three--Control of Food Production and Agriculture

"Sustainable" agriculture and food rationing is being preached everywhere right now. In a very misleading ad, ConAgra Foods is currently implying that 1 in 5 children in the United States is hungry. According to the USDA, 1 in 5 American children is "food insecure" without hunger or threat of hunger--which means that their families are concerned about the family finances as it relates to food. Only just over 1% of children is hungry, according to the USDA. One in three American children is obese--which in the doublespeak world of global environmentalism is actually the same thing as being hungry. All of this propaganda is being pushed out to persuade Americans that we need to give up our high output, high consumption ways of producing food in exchange for "sustainable" farming systems where we will only consume food that is grown locally and is in season. This goes back to the theory of over consumption and over production that I discussed at the beginning of this post. Current food systems produce plenty of food, but those methods are "unsustainable." As Babtune Osotimehin, a Nigerian doctor serving as the executive director of the UNFPA, said a few weeks ago at the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur, "A homeless person in Denmark actually consumes more than a family of six in Tanzania." And since the biggest problem that the world is facing now is that "every young person who grows up in Tanzania wants to drive an SUV" the solution is to ration and create scarcity until all of us are starving, rather than to try to lift up the standards of farming in Tanzania so that they can be better nourished.

The U.N.'s Zero Hunger Campaign is the newest program dedicated to ending over-consumption and food waste. On June 5, for World Environment Day, U.N. officials asked people worldwide to pledge to reduce their own food consumption. I only hope that everyone who signed the pledge understands what they are really signing on for and the profound and dire consequences of trading systems of food production which have historically produced an abundance of food for systems which have historically produced famine and starvation.

Stage Four--Worldwide Population Control

There is a reason that when President Obama spoke at the Planned Parenthood Conference he invoked God's blessing on them. The global environmental movement says that the world cannot support more than between 1 and 2 billion people. This is one reason that China is heralded as a hero in the Globalist New World Order. Their "one child policy" combined with forced abortions makes them perfect country for other nations to pattern themselves after.

Ted Turner, founder of CNN, has said that if we do not reduce the world's population, within 30 or 40 years the planet will be eight degrees hotter, and all of the people left on it will be cannibals. According to Turner, we MUST reduce the population of the world to prevent this. Turner says this can be done voluntarily, just as it is in China.

Of course, China's policies are not voluntary. Last year China made international headlines for the forced abortion of a young married woman who already had a child but had decided she wanted another one. Her dead baby was laid beside her in the hospital bed where she was recovering, and the photos of her lying next to her forcibly aborted child soon went viral and resulted in three Chinese officials being fired.

Yet, at the Women Deliver Conference a few weeks ago, Princeton professor Peter Singer advocated new policies where women are not allowed to have children for the good of the environment. Singer maintains that even with more reproductive choices and family planning, too many women are choosing to have children, and we are entering a new era in which women's reproductive rights can no longer be considered "fundamental".

Maurice Strong, chair of the Earth Summit in 1992, gave an interview to the BBC in the 1970's in which he predicted that in the future people will have to receive licenses from the government in order to be allowed to reproduce.

Stage Five--Global Governance

Speaking on a panel at the Women Deliver Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Kavita Ramdas, an Indian representative of the Ford Foundation, said that people must be forced to make better choices for the environment. "You force it...you can force women to have less children, you can force people to consume less." But the problem with "forcing" people to do what they don't want is that this is incompatible with Western ideals of democracy in which politicians who try to force unpopular agendas typically find themselves out of a job.

To achieve the massive restructuring of the world demanded by global environmentalists, we have to get rid of pesky documents such as the U.S. Constitution which grant individual rights and freedoms as well as democratically-elected forms of government.

Global environmentalists don't really care if the science behind their programs is debunked as long as they can bring in this new system of global governance to correct all of the inequities of the world and create a new world order.

As 1992 Earth Summit chair Maurice Strong has famously stated, "We may get to the point where the only way to save the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse." His sentiments were echoed by former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1996, "The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order."

It is time for Americans to wake up and understand that the global environmentalist movement is not about science--it is about crashing centuries of Western civilization, freedom and democracy and remaking the world into a destitute Hell managed by a global, centralized government of elites. The very people who are selling us this bunk know that they are scaring us into abandoning freedom, prosperity and our way of life in exchange for poverty, misery and slavery. Shame on us if we sit by and let them succeed.

To learn more about United Nation's Agenda 21, how it is being implemented across America, and what you can do to stop it, watch this video presentation:

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Enjoy the next six months--whatever they bring. In January of 2014 our nation is about to be buried under a tsunami of regulations that will limit our freedom and quality of life in ways that we have never before experienced.

No, this post is not about Obamacare. The regulation I am talking about is the qualified residential mortgage piece of the Dodd Frank bill, which will also go into effect in January of 2014 and which will impact nearly everyone in this country.

Not sure "everyone" includes you? Ask yourself these three questions:

1. Do I currently own a home?
2. Do I want to sell my home, now or in the future? (As in, do I ever want to sell my home?)
3. Do I want to buy a home, now or in the future? (This could be a first home, or an upgrade, or a smaller home when I am ready to retire and the kids are gone?)

The qualified mortgage piece of the Dodd Frank bill will affect your ability to do any of these things. How? The qualified mortgage rule contains a couple of very important components. One of these sets the debt to income ratio at 43% for home borrowers. Another caps the total fees and points, including the fees that a mortgage broker or loan officer can earn, at three percent of the loan amount, even if those fees are paid by a third party, such as a lender to whom the broker is selling the loan.

This week is small business week across America. As I have seen ads for small business week I can only shake my head in amazement that a country that pretends to honor small businesses is forcing them to close at an astounding pace. This 3% rule is the final nail in the coffin for small and independent loan originators. (After fifteen years as a loan originator, I closed my own business April 1st of this year because this regulation had been finalized. By including all mortgage fees, to include escrows for taxes and insurance and in some cases, title insurance, in a 3% cap, there is simply no way that a loan originator can earn enough money to keep the doors open.) Of course, as with all of the rules in Dodd Frank the 3% rule cap on fees specifically excludes the fees (service release premiums) that banks receive when they sell closed mortgage loans. So the Dodd Frank bill completes a process that has been going on for several years now--it closes down all of the independent mortgage originators and makes banking entities that can afford to salary their loan originators the only providers of mortgage credit.

What does this mean to you? First of all, it means that starting in January of 2014, you will have a very difficult time finding anybody to originate a home loan for you--even more difficulty than you may be currently experiencing. Second of all, if you do find somebody to originate the loan for you, you probably won't qualify for it.

Dodd Frank, like Obamacare, was a huge framework on which to hang more regulations, so the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was able to write up these new regulations however they wanted. The original bill required a 3% cap on the points and fees of a loan in order for a mortgage to be "qualified". The bill also required an "ability to repay" test. The bill allows for a "presumption of compliance" if certain requirements are met. In other words, if lenders meet the 3% cap for points and fees and comply with some of the other guidelines, in case of an investigation by the CFPB or a consumer complaint, they are presumed innocent until proven guilty as long as they have adhered to all of the rules written by the CFPB in drafting the new regulations.

The geniuses at the CFPB decided that 43% would be a good debt to income ratio for a qualified mortgage. That means that your house payment (including your taxes and insurance), your car payment, your credit card bills, and your court ordered child support payments cannot exceed 43% of your total income. If you make $10,000 a month, every month, your total credit card, auto, and housing expenses, plus any court ordered child support cannot exceed $4300.00 a month.

Due to outcry from industry members, HB 1077 was introduced in March of 2013. The bill, which has never made it out of committee, has 43 co-sponsors, and would modify the 3% rule to exclude escrows for taxes and insurance, loan level price adjustments by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or FHA--this is critical because loan level price adjustments set by these agencies can be substantial--and any compensation paid by a mortgage originator or creditor to any individual employed by the mortgage originator or creditor. Presumably this could allow an independent contractor under contract to a lender to be paid by the lender, as has been the custom for many years. At this point, it is looking as though HB 1077 will die in committee without ever seeing the light of the House floor, but even if it did pass, it likely would not pass the vehemently anti business, anti-property ownership elements in the Senate.

In response to this bill and the considerable complaints about the qualified mortgages, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently announced some modifications to its own regulations. The new modifications allow the compensation to an originator to exceed the 3% cap IF those funds are paid out of pocket by the borrower. This is very important, because the housing model to which Americans have become accustomed over the past several decades is one in which they finance most of the originator's fee through a slightly higher interest rate. In a climate where the interest rates are historically low, if given the option of paying $3000.00 in fees or an extra .25% in interest over 20 years, for a final rate of 3.5%, most borrowers would rather save the cash and pay a little more each month in interest. Starting next year, that won't be an option. If your loan costs and fees exceed the 3% cap, you will have to write the originator a check.

The second modification makes even less sense. The CFPB has decided that 43% is an appropriate debt to income ratio for a borrower UNLESS you are low income and you are obtaining your mortgage financing through a non-profit organization. In that case, your total debt to income ratio can go up to 47%.

Let's look at how this works in real life. Example A: You work as a salaried accountant for a firm where you have been employed for 10 years and you earn $5000.00 a month. You have a car payment of $550.00 a month, one credit card with a $300.00 a month payment on it and you are purchasing a $150,000 house. The escrowed payment on the house to include taxes and insurance will be $1500.00 per month. You have an 820 credit score. Using the new math of big government, you won't qualify. Your total monthly expenses are $2350.00 a month, which would make your debt to income ratio 47%. The fact that you have an 820 credit score, have been on your job 10 years with no gaps, and that you are currently selling a house for which you actually pay MORE than your new payment are immaterial details. You don't meet the guidelines.

However, in Example B, you only make $2500.00 a month, so by the U.S. Census Bureau definitions you are under the median income for your geographic area. You have 5 credit cards, which total $200.00 a month in payments. You are paying $250.00 a month for your car. You are purchasing an $80,000 house with an escrowed payment of $725.00 a month and, wait for it, your loan is coming being originated by an Acornesque non profit. Congratulations, you qualify, even though you have only a 650 credit score and you have been on your current job as a retail store manager for only two years. Your debt to income ratio is also 47%, but you met the guidelines.

Does any of this make sense? Logically, the accountant with 10 years on the job and the 820 score is a better risk, but he doesn't get the loan, whereas the lower income indvidual does even though his debt ratio represents substantially less disposable income than Example A. Welcome to the world of federal underwriting standards.

My example includes only salaried persons. The ability to repay standards that were already being implemented when I left housing finance in April of this year were choking self-employed borrowers out of the housing market. Are you making money this year? Do you have an exclusive patent on tiddly winks which is generating unprecedented revenue, and you want to buy a house while the prices are down? Unless you had an equally good year in the previous two, you are not going to be able to qualify. Do you earn salary plus commission? If your commissions decreased over the previous two year period, you probably cannot use them to qualify even if this year your earnings exceed levels prior to the recession.

When the FDIC's Sheila Blair was first working on the qualified residential mortgage standards she told us that the qualified mortgage and qualified residential mortgages were written with extremely narrow guidelines because they were meant to be "a very small slice of the pie". Now that we know that the QMs and QRMs are the only mortgages that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are planning to purchase, they are not such a small piece of the pie--they are the entire pie. And it is a pie that very few people will even get to taste. In February of this year, Corelogic Credco--an industry source for financial and credit reporting information--released a study on the qualified mortgages. Their study found that only about 50% of the borrowers who qualified for residential mortgages in 2010 would still qualify under the new QM guidelines.

Still lurking out in the regulatory mist is another set of regulations yet to be released--the qualified residential mortgages. If these new rules introduce a 10% down payment requirement, as they are widely expected to do, only about 40% of borrowers will qualify for a home mortgage. So our country is about to experience yet another seismic shift--the land where traditionally 60% of the population are homeowners will morph into a country of 60% renters. Bear in mind that interest rates are still historically low. When rates rise, as they are already starting to do, mortgage payments will increase making it even harder to meet the 43% guideline.

Our industry has read these guidelines with sorrow and lamented about "the law of unintended consequences." If I were allowed to ban one phrase from English usage, "the law of unintended consequences" would be the one. These new restrictions on housing lending are not unintended at all. They are fully intended and they have been carefully crafted and orchestrated to transform us from a society of homeowners to a society of renters. And that transformation is going basically unnoticed and almost completely unopposed.

Regular readers of this post know that I have been doing a series of posts on global environmentalism and the UN. Our global president, who apparently still has the applause of Europe even while his approval rating plummets at home, is completely committed to the goals of climate change and the UN's policy document for restructuring the world--Agenda 21. Global environmentalism calls for ridding the world of private property and packing humans into dense "human settlements". That demand has led to "New Urbanism" and "Smart Growth" and "Sustainable Development" all over this country. But the problem with trying to implement global restructuring is that for it to really succeed, the people need some buy in. Americans like to own homes. Home ownership has been the American Dream for centuries. The only way to eradicate that dream is to legislatively barr most people from home ownership. Suddenly a tiny apartment in the city becomes the only option for housing space when you have been regulated out of the suburbs by a combination of mortgage rules you can't meet, high fuel prices, and soaring gas prices. At least, you can embrace your new, dense, crowded surroundings with the knowledge that the laws that sentenced you there were passed for your own protection.

The American people deserve a lot better than this, and we should be demanding better. Yes, we have a lot of issues to deal with right now: looming Obamacare premiums, myriad government scandals, high unemployment, etc. etc. etc. But just because there are a lot of other problems does not mean we get to ignore this one.

Like Obamacare, Dodd Frank can only be repealed with a Congress and Senate willing to vote for passage of a new bill and a president willing to sign it. But Congress could defund the CFPB and set aside the regulations written under the authority of an illegally appointed director, Richard Cordray, who was assigned his post as a recess appointment while the Senate was not actually in recess. Congress should be using whatever tools they have at their disposal to prevent these rules from being implemented and to at least maintain the status quo in housing finance, because while the status quo is not good, it is immeasurably better than what we are about to face.

Find out more about Agenda 21 and what it REALLY means: to your city, this country and our world, by watching this presentation.

Friday, June 14, 2013

In the novel, The Chosen, which I co-authored last year, the year is 2017 and the United States government has established the Electronic Communications Agency to monitor all speech and electronic communications. Two whistle blowers get a list of Americans who have been wrongly incarcerated under the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act and launch a website to raise public awareness of the mass arrests that are taking place. But the ECA is able to use its new powers to shut down the website and when the whistleblowers are located they themselves are imprisoned as domestic terrorists under the detention provisions of the NDAA.

This story seemed less like fiction over the last few days as Edward Snowden revealed massive surveillance being conducted by the NSA regarding Americans texts, emails, Internet searches, phone calls, and now it appears even financial and credit card transactions. While I was not particularly surprised to find out that such a program is underway, or that the Feds are constructing a massive storage facility in Utah to house all of our information for decades to come, or even that our politicians on both sides of the aisle are defending this practice, what does surprise me is the number of otherwise intelligent, reasonably well-informed Americans who don't seem to mind that this is happening. The attitudes of a lot of Americans could best be summarized by the comments of the two anchors of the top rated morning show in El Paso, Texas, who, on the morning the story aired, both joked that if federal agents were listening in on them, the agents would be really bored. This, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't have anything to worry about" attitude is a prevailing reason that we have allowed to our government to become so bloated that the very size of government is now being used as an excuse for the abuses in the recently uncovered IRS scandal. Most Americans who are just living their lives and not planning nefarious acts tend to believe that it doesn't matter how much surveillance we have because police only arrest bad guys.

There are so many problems with this concept. First of all, in a society where laws continue to proliferate, we continue to redefine what criminal behavior is. This morning, the Heritage Foundation featured an excellent video on the overcriminalization of America and how it affects otherwise law-abiding citizens who are found breaking laws they had no idea existed. When we add to this problem the problem of massive surveillance we have created a perfect storm for virtually anyone to be arrested on any pretext at any time. And as that net of laws grows, the surveillance creates a bigger swath of suspects. Let's look at a few of the issues here:

1. Hate speech. Hate speech is one of those vaguely defined euphemisms for "You said something I don't like, so now I am coming after you." Within the past few weeks we have seen growing encroachments on our time honored, Constitutionally-protected freedom of speech. The Department of Justice recently suggested that it will no longer tolerate Internet posts maligning Islam. Sen. Lindsey Graham has suggested that bloggers are not protected by the First Amendment. (Sorry Senator: ALL Americans are protected by the First Amendment--those who blog and those who don't.) Congressman Peter King thinks that journalists should no longer be allowed to report on sensitive information and should be prosecuted if they do. So, if in the course of an NSA sweep, some twenty-something who aspires to get promoted rather than assassinated notes a pattern of inflammatory speech in certain social media shares or posts, he may immediately report this to the DOJ who can then send two agents to your door in the wee hours of the morning to arrest you in your pajamas for spouting your Constitutionally protected opinions online.

2. Threats to National Security. We are going down an ultra slippery slope here. Under the NDAA, which the House of Representatives voted to uphold this week, American citizens who are threats to national security can be detained indefinitely without trial and held "until the cessation of hostilities." To qualify, those charged are supposed to have connections to Al-Qaeda or its affiliates, but if we continue down the road we are going, that definition will soon be broadened. Have you made hateful comments about the President in a text message or an email? Have you complained about Congress or the Senate, or even your local mayor? At what point does speaking against the government, or any of its agents, or even just the really inept cashier at City Hall who can't count change, make you an enemy of the state and subject you to arrest and detention? Once we start censoring some types of speech we are on a path that leads to some past brutal European monarchies of the middle ages who had laws making it a criminal act to speak ANYTHING about the ruler or the government, whatsoever, even if it were positive, because the people had no right to comment on their government at all.

Well, you may be thinking, that does not apply because the NSA is not keeping the content of our emails, phone calls or texts--just the Metadata. (We know this must be so because our government is comprised of such a trustworthy group of outstanding, virtuous men and women who would never misrepresent the truth.) The NSA is also tracking your on line searches. Have you ever visited a website that the government might not like? No, I am not talking about How to Build a Nuclear Weapon in Ten Easy Steps.com. What about the website of the American Center for Law and Justice or some similar Constitutional attorney, or even a civil liberties group like the ACLU which filed suit against the federal government this week over the NSA surveillance? Or perhaps you have visited the websites of one of the rabble-rousing politicians who is standing against the tide of public opinion--somebody like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul? Have you visited a website for a Crisis Pregnancy Center or a Pro-Life Advocacy group? Are you a libertarian, or a tea party member? Have you ever visited a site hosted by anyone with these leanings just out of curiosity? Have you ever contributed money to any of these people or organizations? If the answer to that final question is yes, you undoubtedly used your credit card to do so, so they have your information twice.

Do you read, listen to, or in some form consume alternative media--whether left or right? Those visits have been noted and logged. A government that wants to control what the people are saying needs to also control what they are thinking and to whom they are listening. By tracking each search and log in, the NSA can track where Americans are getting their information. In The Chosen, the ECA has the power to simply shut down any website that they deem to be "Anti-American" and those hosting such a sight are then turned over to Homeland Security as domestic terrorists. We are planting the seeds for this to become a reality with the surveillance programs that are occurring right now.

But suppose that you are not interested in politics--left, right or libertarian--at all. You don't listen to alternative media. You use the Internet only to feed your all consuming passion for celebrity gossip and to catch up the latest news on Beyonce and Kim Kardashian. Then the following test of whether you have anything to worry about from the NSA surveillance program might just be for you. (My brother, who is a twenty-year operations manager for a television station put these questions to the cub reporters in the newsroom when they told him that they were not worried about government surveillance. Think about them carefully.)

1. Have you ever had an affair--either while you were married or with a married person? Did you send emails, texts or some other electronic communications to your paramour?

2. Have you ever watched online porn--even just once out of curiosity?

3. Have you ever logged on to a gay porn website just out of curiosity?

4. Have you ever been involved in a gay relationship that you wanted to keep a secret? Did you text or email the other person?

5. Have you ever smoked pot? Perhaps your usage was recreational and occasional, but you sent text messages to your dealer when you were ready to buy.

6. Have you engaged in a flirtatious relationship with a co-worker where you sent racy texts? Perhaps it never went further than online flirting, but you messaged each other a lot of provocative material.

7. Have you ever posted racy, provocative photos of yourself online, or texted them or emailed them to another person?

How would you feel if your spouse or your family or your co-workers or your boss suddenly knew about any of this behavior? The NSA has the meta data for all of these activities stored in a huge warehouse. Imagine that a decade from now you have an opportunity as a journalist to publish a big story exposing government or some well connected individual. You are ready to go public when you get a phone call explaining to you that your personal information is going to be exposed if you go forward with the story. You have just lost the ability to hold government accountable. Any opportunity for real journalism is dead in a world where the government stores all of its secrets and airs them at will. What if you are not a journalist but an attorney in a civil rights suit, or a judge ruling on the legality of a government action? What if you are a major donor of an organization the government does not like? What if you are engaged in a battle with a union leader who is a supporter of the Administration? What if you decide to run for office?

Let me just say flatly that I do not for one minute believe the story that only meta data is being stored, if for no other reason that the federal government has lied to us all so much for the past few years that I cannot see any good reason why they would start being honest now. But even if that is the truth and all they are collecting is the websites we browse and the phone numbers we call and text with the frequency with which we do so, this is too much information. The federal government now has a lens through which to do a microscopic examination of every person who might challenge them in any way. If you are one of those Americans who still believes that the Obama Administration is incapable of misusing its power to harm the citizenry, just remember that in three years there will be a different Administration led by a different individual. No American can be so completely asleep to insist that No Administration will ever use the information being collected to persecute, silence or falsely imprison those who challenge them. We have to stand against this now while we still have a voice and we can still speak out. If we fail to do so, the heavy price we pay in the future will be our own fault.

Watch Alexandra's video presentation on the threat that the global environmental movement poses to freedom and the Constitution.

Friday, June 7, 2013

The scandals just keep pouring in. First we learned that the IRS really was targeting all of those tea party groups who kept insisting last summer that they were being harassed because of their political views. Then we learned that the Administration was spying on the AP. Next we discovered that Fox News journalist James Rosen was the subject of an investigation after he was identified as a possible co-conspirator involved in activities against the federal government. Then this week we learned that the NSA has been reviewing the phone records of approximately 100 million Americans, and yesterday we learned about PRISM--a federal surveillance program through which the government is tracking the on-line activity of all us via 9 Internet companies including Facebook, Google, Youtube and Microsoft.

This massive surveillance of all U.S. citizens, combined with the use of federal agencies to punish dissenters, is once again leading to speculation about Obama's "enemies list". After all, Valerie Jarrett did promise that after the 2012 election, the Administration would get even with those who had opposed them. In light of everything that is happening now, it is easy to say that this is about simply tracking down dissenters and punishing them. But I think that the "enemies list" is a bigger issue than specific individuals or groups of individuals.

To understand what is happening in our country today, it is essential to understand that Obama is the global president. He is the president who campaigned in Europe as well as in the U.S. He is the president who bowed to the rulers of Saudi Arabia. As part of his commitment to the global good, he is also the climate change president--the candidate who promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to bring the earth back into harmony. As the global climate change president, he is entrenched in the goals of the modern global climate change movement.

Most of us here in the U.S. think that the goal of the global environmental movement is to get us to recycle our plastics and plant trees. Those are diversionary tactics--they have nothing to do with the real goals of environmentalism. The U.N. has expressed its goals for a global environmental utopia through its policy documents--Agenda 21--which demands the three E's--equity or social equality, environmental justice and economy. The social equality "E" demands wealth redistribution on a massive scale. Most of the people who voted for Obama both the first and the second time did so because they believed that he stood for wealth redistribution within the United States--some massive program of restructuring that would take from the super rich and elevate the standard of living of everyone currently below the poverty level. But that is not at all what wealth redistribution means to a globalist. To a globalist, wealth redistribution means lowering the standards of living in the West, and specifically the U.S., to the levels of third world countries--think Nigeria or Kenya or Indonesia. (Anyone who saw Dinesh d'Souza's excellent film Obama 2016 can appreciate what this means since he goes to Indonesia and Kenya for his documentary.)

The environmental justice piece demands that the needs of the earth be treated equally with the needs of humans. So we see the EPA regulating businesses out of business; we are burdened with expensive light bulbs, and we are hearing about new regulations from the USDA that will limit what crops farmers can grow. We see overreaching policies such as the EPA's failed attempt to classify storm water as a pollutant. Environmental justice is an excuse to destroy all business, industry and private property in the U.S. under the guise of "protecting the environment."

Finally, there is the economy piece. The basic premise of all global environmentalism is that Americans have too much, consume too much and produce too much and that our standard of living inspires other countries to want to emulate us. At the Women Deliver Conference held in Kuala Lampur last week, globalists once again vented not only about population growth but about the wealth and "unsustainable" consumption of the West. Babtunde Osotimehin, a Nigerian doctor who is serving as the executive director of the UNFPA, restated globalist goals to restrict consumption and production by the wealthy nations of the world. "A homeless person in Denmark actually consumes more than a family of six in Tanzania," he explained, adding that the problem, "is that every young person who grows up in Tanzania wants to drive an SUV."

The solution to this to reduce Westerners, and especially Americans, rights and consumption patterns--to restrict our food, our housing, our ability to have children. Kavita Ramdas, an Indian representative of the Ford Foundation who attended the Women Deliver Conference, stated plainly, "If Americans consume more than Africans, they should be forced into a one child policy." When asked how to make that work in practical terms, she added, "You force it; you can force women to have less children, you can force people to consume less."

Unfortunately for Ramdas, in a democracy, you can't force it. The U.N. is pretty mum on this point, but other advocates of the global environmental movement, such as the Club of Rome, are much more direct. Democracy and the global sustainable movement cannot work in sync with each other because people will deprive themselves only up to a point and then they tend to vote out politicians who attempt to force unpopular agendas. So the only way to actually produce a global dystopia is to change the government.

And that brings me back to the "enemies list." The Administration does in fact have an enemies list. This list is not exclusive to the Obama Administration--it is shared by all proponents of global environmentalism in both parties. This is not an exhaustive list, but it includes the top ten major enemies of the global environmental movement. Without annihilation of these threats to globalism, the climate change movement cannot move forward:

10. Freedom. From a free society flows all of the benefits that globalists despise. Freedom produces thought, innovation, action, hope and prosperity. But it is this very innovation and prosperity that globalists blame for destroying the world. So freedom has to go.

9. Prosperity. American patterns of consumption and production are repeatedly blamed for all of the world's ills. Not only do we use too much, eat too much, own too much, have too much and produce too much, but we inspire people in other nations to want to do the same. Our prosperity must be destroyed--both to stop our production and consumption and to show other nations that in the new global order, no system that fosters prosperity will be tolerated.

8. Free Markets. Our prosperity has been produced in large part by free markets that reward innovation and function on supply and demand principles. If we run out of something, we make more. If there is a market for a particular item, we invent it. These processes lead to the high levels of consumption and production which must be destroyed for global environmentalism to prevail.

7. Democratic processes. As I stated earlier, in their candid moments, climate change advocates will admit that democracy does not lead to the kind of central planning and control over population, food sources, housing, transportation and energy, that are needed to produce the world called for by globalists for the primary reason that the people generally choose programs which benefit themselves. Therefore, for global environmentalism to work, democracy has to fail.

6. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are necessarily enemies for a number of reasons. First, the Constitution defines our nation. National sovereignty is a threat to globalism which must be destroyed. Likewise, a Bill of Rights guaranteeing individual freedoms is a dangerous obstacle to a central planning system where the people exist only for the greater good. Therefore, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have to be attacked and shredded completely until either the public understands that they no longer have any practical value or until the public is ready to submit to a new more authoritarian type of control.

5. Patriotism. Patriotism is part of the national sovereignty issue. Patriotism is a dangerous quality--it makes a person loyal to the traditions and customs of their own country and culture. The goal of globalism is to make everyone part of a world community where our lives are decided for us and any rewards are doled out by the government.

4. Personal initiative. Personal initiative and the desire for a better life are as dangerous to globalism as patriotism. The individual who believes that he can improve his life through his own actions and efforts is on the road to prosperity and affluence, which is the enemy of globalism. For a global system to work, individuals need to believe that they are unable to do anything on their own--that they are completely dependent on the great machine of government.

3. Personal safety. Every attack on our freedom--whether it is the result of a terrorist like Tsarnaev setting bombs at the Boston Marathon, or a surveillance plan from the NSA--serves to make us feel less safe and secure. This is critical to globalism. If we perceive that we are safe or that we have the ability to protect ourselves, we are less likely to fall in line for global control.

2. Individual access to guns. Let's face it--in the U.S. we guarantee our personal safety and that of our family members with guns. Taking the guns away from the population is vital. Not only does disarming the population create the levels of fear and personal insecurity that are a necessary part of greater government control, but it also makes it much easier to enforce the other aspects of globalism, such as confiscation of private property, food rationing and population control.

1. Christianity. A May 3, 2013, headline in the Huffington Post declared, Climate Change Study: Religious Belief in the Second Coming of Christ Could Slow Global Warming Action. According to the study, released May 1, 56% of Americans believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and this belief makes them less likely to embrace climate change legislation.

Christianity is the enemy for so many reasons. It teaches the existence of a personal God who loves us individually, who grants us spiritual freedom (freedom), who watches over us and protects us (personal safety) who has tasks for each of us to complete and expects us to fulfill them with His help (personal initiative), who cares about injustice and judges the lives of all men and expects us to treat each other fairly (individual rights). From this concept of a loving God who cares for us and wants us to care for each other--both Christians and non Christians--flows the idea of freedom for all people, and from that freedom flows prosperity and abundance that are so hated by globalists. That makes Christians the most dangerous enemy of all to any Administration bent on furthering the goals of a new world order.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

It's not easy being green. Global environmentalism and the sustainable movement have their own language where ordinary words and phrases take on extraordinary meanings and significance. To help, I have deciphered some of the most common terms for you here in this post. So treat yourself to you a new experience this summer and impress all your friends by learning a new language--Greenspeak.

The following is a list of Greenspeak terms along with their definitions:

Green Economy: Green Economy is achieved when the government succeeds in extracting all of the green from your wallet, bank accounts, and retirement accounts and gives it to their friends to sponsor bogus alternative energy projects. (Example: Solyndra)

Carbon Footprints: The black marks your feet will make when you walk barefoot after the government has banned all animal products and oil-based synthetics such as plastics, etc, from being manufactured into shoes. (The only practical way to effectively reduce the size of these is to cut off your toes.)

Global Warming: That eerily predictable period when the earth rapidly heats to uncomfortable temperatures, normally between the months of June and August in the northern hemisphere. Episodes of global warming have also been documented after any speech given by any left-leaning politician due to the vast increases in levels of hot air present at such events. It should be noted that these latter episodes can occur at any time without warning.

Climate Change: A fearful occurrence which takes place about four times a year as the earth becomes increasingly colder, resulting in icy precipitation and the death of plants, which gives way to a warming cycle where the plants do re-emerge as we go into that uncomfortable "global warming" cycle noted in the previous definition. After August we go back into the cooling cycle. The goal of climate change legislation is to stop these scary and inconvenient processes and fix the temperature at 72 degrees Fahrenheit worldwide with a sort of government-legislated climatic thermostat.

Green World Order: A new system of global governance in which a handful of pre-selected, lucky individuals get all of the property and all of the greenbacks while the rest of us survive in a state of perpetual serfdom as we perform whatever tasks are assigned to us by our new rulers and subsist on whatever they allow us to have.

Wealth Redistribution: A new worldwide economic system in which all but the previously mentioned lucky, pre-selected individuals are reduced to abject poverty with no hope for the future. As we suffer through our miserable new slavery, however, we can take comfort knowing that we are enriching the environment, as well as our new masters.

Fairness: A new world system in which everyone is the same. Everyone in the world has the same third world standard of living, the same substandard housing, the same lack of opportunity, the same inadequate, unappetizing food and the same lack of opportunity. For anyone, except for the previously mentioned pre-selected few, to have more than anyone else is inherently unfair, and this unfairness must be corrected through a new economic system. The thinking here is that since we can't make everyone rich, we must make everyone poor.

Sustainable/Sustainabililty: The primary engine for accomplishing the aforementioned strategy to impoverish all people equally. Any economic or social system that works, produces wealth or comfort, or benefits more than just the preselected few is dubbed "unsustainable" and destroyed in order to achieve "fairness."

Smart Growth/Smart Code: Dumb is the new "Smart." Tiny, expensive, uncomfortable housing that you can access only through public transportation will leave your pockets and your life empty. (Hey, as NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg says, 47% of Manhattanites are single anyway so why do they need to occupy more than 250 square feet for an apartment? His tiny, micro apartments are soon to be a model for us all--just don't make any plans to upgrade your relationship status. But what does this mean to couples who are already married, or--horrors--have children? We can only guess.)

Green Spaces: Those tiny islands in your parking lot that contain a small clump of grass and/or a spindly tree. They make parking less efficient and more dangerous but do nothing to make the world a greener, better place. Alternately, "green spaces" can also be used as a 21st century term for a public park--renamed to encompass the new reality that any "green space" is actually commonly held ground to make up for the fact that you have been relegated to a 250 foot hellhole of an apartment.

Universal: Universal means that a certain item or service will be available to all equally, which in practice means that it will be available to no one except for the pre-selected few. Examples include "universal" health care which is pricing all Americans out of their health insurance and destroying access to medical care for average people. Another such project is the U.N. zero hunger challenge which promises to end all hunger everywhere through a system of food rationing which will starve most of us to death--but that starvation will, for the most part, be both universal and equally distributed.

Population Stabilization: This is a U.N. euphemism for ridding the world of six of its seven billion people. There are just too many of us--so each country has to "stabilize" its population. Proposed means for doing this include adopting completely voluntary means of populations control based on those used currently in China. China's population control tactics are completely voluntary, right? My only question is this: Since China's population control policies have reduced the Chinese population to 1.3 billion and since that number is approximately the total number of people that the entire world can support, what does this goal mean for the rest of us?

Saturday, June 1, 2013

The origins of the term "global warming" are commonly attributed to a scientist named Wallace Broecker of Columbia University who, in 1975, authored a paper titled, "Climactic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" Broecker's premise was that the earth was getting hotter and hotter due to greenhouse gas emissions from the rising number of humans on earth and human use of aerosols. Although Broecker is credited with coining the phrase, it actually pre-dates him. "Global warming" is the theme of a 1973 sci-fi movie titled "Soylent Green" starring Charlton Heston in which the earth's temperature has increased so much that agriculture is no longer possible, people are forced to live in crowded cities, the only food substance is plankton from the oceans and a handful of wealthy elites run the world. (According to one post I read, the term "global warming" appears in this film. The term also appears in some newspaper articles from the 1950's.)

In 1988 NASA scientist James E. Hansen testified to Congress about "global warming"-specifically global warming from greenhouse gases. After his testimony, the phrase and the concept grew in popularity along with the idea that the human race needed to take dramatic steps to reduce the negative effects of people on planet earth.

It was in such an environment that, in 1992, the United Nations held its Earth Summit and produced Agenda 21--its policy document for how to completely remake our world into a new world order. The main premise of Agenda 21 is that Western, and especially American, wealth and prosperity are the cause of all of the world's environmental problems and that the solution is to replace the free market systems that have produced this prosperity with centralized planning and a system of rationing for all resources. Wealth redistribution, scarcity and rationing on a global scale are Agenda 21's answers to all of the world's ills. The document calls for all of the nations of the world to advance its goals through federal laws, but vigilance in the United States by many who understand the destructive nature of these policies has prevented passage of a federal climate change bill so far.

Now, it seems that the earth has gone into a cooling phase, or at least that "global warming" has paused. Even proponents of the pseudo-science of climate change acknowledge this. A report released in the United Kingdom this past Christmas indicates that, contrary to the predictions of Broecker and his climate conspirators, the global median temperature is not higher than it was a decade ago. A Huffington Post article published in January of 2013 tries to make sense of the pause in global warming with the preposterous claim that perhaps coal usage in China is artificially cooling the earth and preventing the full effects of global warming from taking place. Only in the upside down world of global environmentalism does Chinese coal burning produce planet-saving cooling, while in the U.S. this same practice further destroys the planet.

With on-going "global warming" now in dispute, proponents of global environmentalism have now turned their attention to climate change. They attribute every tragedy, from the tornadoes in Moore, Oklahoma, last week to Hurricane Sandy last fall, to human actions and demand a federal climate change bill. Proponents of climate change legislation know that the solution has already been devised in Agenda 21--they just need to either find or create the right problem so that we will let them implement this "solution" fully.

President Obama ran in 2008 on a climate change platform in which he made the promise to set the boundaries of the oceans. (Really? One man has the power to set the boundaries of the oceans by getting the right set of laws passed? Really?) Though he does not yet have his climate change bill, he continues to advance the climate change agenda through various agencies, like the EPA, and through his policies which are redefining how Americans work, live and travel and even how much we are allowed to eat.

Agenda 21 is being implemented at every level of our society through both federal initiatives and local ones. Agenda 21 is in my hometown of El Paso, Texas--if it is not in your hometown it soon will be. It is not now, nor has it ever been, about "saving the planet." It is about destroying American wealth and influence in the world and bankrupting our country--one city at a time.

On Sunday, May 19th, I was asked to speak on the subject of Agenda 21. After you watch this presentation, get involved in your community to put the brakes on Agenda 21. Last June, Alabama passed a law banning implementation of Agenda 21; this year Oklahoma and Missouri are working on similar bills. This threat to our prosperity and our national sovereignty advances one city at a time, and we can stop it one city at a time--if we will. If we don't, we will wake up in a few years to learn that we have allowed ourselves to be bankrupted into a globalist hell worthy of any sci-fi scriptwriter.

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About Me

In 1986, Alexandra Swann graduated at fifteen years of age with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Brigham Young University and a GPA of 3.85. The following year, when she was sixteen, she received a Master’s Degree in History from California State University. After graduation, she taught history and English as a second language for four years at El Paso Community College. In 1989, her book, No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned Me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen, was published, in which she details her experiences with homeschooling. In 1993, the Swann Family was featured in the CBS Television Series, “How’d They Do That?”They were the subject of articles in The National Enquirer and Woman’s World, and were featured on Paul Harvey’s radio broadcast.

For fifteen years, from 1998- 2013, Alexandra was self-employed in the financial services industry in El Paso, Texas. As a small business owner who was active in the community and on various civic boards, she learned first-hand the challenges that excessive regulations create for small businesses. In 2012 she received the SBA’s Regional Minority Small Business Champion of the Year award.

In 2010, Alexandra and her mother incorporated Frontier 2000 Media Group to produce clean, wholesome, inspirational entertainment for families.She re-released No Regrets with a new foreword to the twentieth anniversary edition of the book updating readers on what her family is doing today. She is also co-author of four novels including The Fourth Kingdomwhich was selected as one of four finalists in the Christianity Today 2011 Christian Fiction Book Awards. Her solo novel, The Planner about the dangerous consequences of progressive big government and Agenda 21, was released in June of 2012. For more information visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net